A glass wall at Seattle-Tacoma aiport is vertically convex and horizontally concave. The wall, 60 feet high by 350 feet long, overlooks the tarmac.

Denver's 1999 Broadway building, a glass tower designed to protect and reflect the Holy Ghost Church.

The exterior of the National Museum of the Marine Corps near Washington, D.C. The somber design includes a glass atrium, its elevation gently sloping to evoke the iconic image of the flag raisers of Iwo Jima.

The Denver Art Museum has a new exhibit honoring architect Curtis Fentress' work throughout the years.

It takes an architect with a certain ambition in a city of a certain size to have the impact Curtis Fentress has had on Denver. Building by building, he has remade this place in the image of his own design.

He created our most iconic structure, DIA, our busiest, the Colorado Convention Center, our highest-profile, Sports Authority Field, and certainly some of our showiest, like 1999 Broadway, the gleaming tower that hovers over historic Holy Ghost Church downtown.

Not every building is a success — his new Ralph Carr Judicial Complex next to the Capitol is already controversial and it’s not even finished — but each has been a big, bold statement rendered in rock, steel and glass and fortified to last the ages. Five decades from now, Denver won’t be the city of John Hickenlooper or John Elway; those will be just names on boulevards or training facilities. But the things Curt Fentress dreamed up will still be standing, not history but a vital part of everyday life.

That’s not a bad legacy for a self-described napkin sketcher, a guy who grew up in a log cabin in North Carolina and who seems to take his success in stride. Ambition? He’s got it, he says. But he doesn’t let it get the better of his ego.

“You have to be ambitious to create Denver International Airport,” Fentress said last week as a major exhibit honoring his work opened at the Denver Art Museum. “But it has to be ambition that’s properly channeled and controlled to work for your clients.”

After, all, he says, “They have ambitions and egos themselves.”

That sort of statement, sincere and shilling at the same time, may be the key to Fentress’ remarkable success, not just in Denver, but across the country and even in the Middle East where he has designed massive structures. He gives customers what they want, on time and within budget.

And he’s not, to put it frankly, all architect-y in public. While other designers chatter on about theoretical volumes and masses and planes, Fentress talks plainly about people and places and how buildings should serve them. One of his personal design principles is that it ought to be easy to find the front door.

He’s not an intellectual — he says so himself — but he is a quick and clever thinker, a world-class problem-solver, and he has made clients comfortable enough to put $22 billion worth of projects in his hands.

“Curt is extraordinary when it comes to getting work,” said John Anderson, a 50-year design veteran and a founder of Denver’s durable Anderson Mason Dale design firm. “You could say he’s quite the salesman as well as a fine conceptual designer.”

There is one Fentress concept that stands above the rest, the one that made him a star 20 years ago: He came up with the white, fabric roof that rises in peaks over Denver International Airport.

It happened in a flash, he says. He was about a decade into a decent practice in Denver, after a stint with the legendary New York firm Kohn, Pederson, Fox. He and his then-partner Jim Bradburn won the contract to design the relocated Denver airport, but the project hit some turbulence. It was getting too expensive and the city complained his drawings weren’t distinct enough. Officials wanted something more memorable, like the Sydney Opera House.

Clients rarely ask architects to take a risk like that. The two designers seized the moment.

“We immediately went to a bar,” Fentress said. Out came the cocktail napkins.

The roof, actually Teflon-coated fiberglass, reduced construction costs by $75 million and created an international landmark. Offers to design buildings near and far arrived for Fentress.

Works of art

When curator Donald Albrecht surveyed the work of Curt Fentress for the DAM exhibit, he had a lot to choose from. Fentress has designed scores of buildings. The soaring, graceful (former) Amoco Building on Broadway at 17th Street downtown, the 60-story Arraya Tower in Kuwait City, the solemn National Museum of the Marine Corps outside of Washington, D.C.

But Albrecht, who works full-time for the Museum of the City of New York, is a historian and quickly recognized where Fentress had made his real mark: airport design. The show he put together, “Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight,” occupies a sizable chunk of DAM’s Hamilton Building and zooms through six projects — from the DIA game-changer in 1995 up to Fentress’ present endeavor, a total makeover of Los Angeles’ LAX airport set to open in March. The exhibit is tight, informative and easy to digest with photos, video and light text.

Albrecht’s working theory is that Fentress’ high-design, passenger-centered terminals have brought back the glamour of air travel that crumbled when carriers were deregulated in 1978 and airports were overwhelmed with passengers. To make his point, he has included a history of passenger planes, early promotional posters and a few chic stewardess uniforms from the golden age.

The exhibit’s highlight, though, is the architectural models for each site. Detailed and precious, they provide insight into building structure and the way Fentress does his work.

In each city, the designer has borrowed some motif from the local community or geography. In Denver, a nod to the snowcapped peaks on the horizon; in Incheon, South Korea, references to the curved, sloping roofs of the region’s homes. In San Jose, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley, Fentress’ airport is laid out like coaxial cable.

The references are literal, maybe even too obvious. But there’s a through-line that gives communities an ownership of their home base. Plus, each has its own share of well-engineered, people friendly moves, such as the Seattle-Tacoma airport’s giant glass wall, 60 feet tall and 350 feet long. Vertically convex and horizontally concave, the window turns the tarmac into performance art for bored passengers.

Architects use their offices as a way of showing off their work, and the places tend to reflect the designers themselves. That’s true of the Fentress Architects headquarters at Fourth Avenue and Broadway in Denver.

On the outside, the modern, seven-story steel building stands out in its historic, low-rise neighborhood, but it is quiet, unassuming. There isn’t even a sign, except for some lettering on the glass doors.

Curt Fentress, too, stands tall. He looks good in a suit. He doesn’t carry a Carolina drawl so much, but he keeps the paced cadence of a genteel Southern accent. He has wavy gray hair that he keeps a little long and a pair of tiny, green eyeglasses that he tends to peer over rather than through. Otherwise, he comes off as quiet.

But both the office and the man are capable of things that belie their exteriors. Over the years, Fentress Architects (Bradburn retired in 2005) has turned into a compound of sorts, swallowing up four adjacent buildings and stretching back to the Watermark condominium complex, where he and his wife, firm CEO Agatha Kessler, now live.

As architecture companies go, Fentress is big business. Design fees vary by project, but are typically 10 percent of any building’s construction budget. Consider: Sports Authority Field was a $347 million project, the Colorado Convention Center $310 million. Concurrently, the firm is completing the $1.2 billion LAX airport renovation, a $550 million redo of the San Diego Convention Center and the $248 million Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center at 13th Avenue and Broadway.

Fentress and his team (he mentions them often) complete more modest projects, but a $100 million structure, like the Jefferson County Government Center in Golden, is not uncommon.

Nor is it unusual anymore to work overseas. Like a lot of U.S. firms, Fentress has won a sizable piece of the building boom in the Middle East. New to the Fentress portfolio: the amazing Dubai Towers, two 700-foot mixed-use towers dubbed the “Dancing Sisters” because they undulate vertically; one shimmies in, while the other shakes it out.

Fentress avoids trademark moves, like Frank Gehry’s curving walls or Daniel Libeskind’s sharpened corners. If there is a theme, he says, it comes in his tendency to pick a design gesture, say a line or a symbol and repeat it. You can see that clearly in his LAX plan, a series of steep shells that rise up and again to form its gates. Or he points to the logical way his buildings unfold.

Also common: A confidence in natural light, a trait Colorado architects have mastered, and a tendency to draw extreme rooflines on his horizontal projects: DIA’s tents, the Convention Center’s slanted, cantilevered overhangs, the roller coaster swoop that tops Sports Authority Field.

Local hero?

Curt Fentress pauses, then picks his favorites designs. “Sea-Tac” airport he calls “small and fantastic,” and he gets sentimental talking about the Marine Corps Museum. Fentress was inspired by the iconic photo of World War II Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima and shaped the museum’s roofline into a glass peak that mirrors the photo’s triangular shape.

He speaks highly about the airport in Incheon, about how much he enjoyed working in Dubai. And while it is clear he is proud of DIA, his other Denver buildings are suspiciously absent from his list.

Has he done his best work in other places? Probably, he says.

Others see it that way, too. John Anderson is a Fentress fan. He’s flown into Incheon and thinks it’s brilliant. Looking around Denver, he sees successes and failures.

“Like anybody else in this crazy dodge called architecture, there are good days and bad days and some of his work is better than others,” said Anderson.

Others have suggested Fentress has simply done too much in Denver. No architect can sustain his good work project after project.

Jeff Sheppard, probably the most dynamic architect in Denver these days with a reputation for making buildings that push design forward while keeping budgets low, suggests Fentress’ backyard criticisms come from the type of buildings he makes here more than the designs themselves.

Massive institutional buildings like convention centers and court offices just aren’t that exciting unless they have some additional way of engaging the public. If the convention center had been designed with a giant park on its roof or if the parking lot surrounding the football stadium were turned into a giant drive-in theater off-season, people would appreciate them more.

“That’s not his fault, it’s just that single-use buildings are a thing of the past,” Sheppard said.

The DAM exhibit, while well done, adds fuel to the fire. The whole point of the show was to tout a hometown hero, but only one of the six projects it presents are in Colorado.

Fentress is proud of his institutional work. If he hasn’t gotten more creative projects here, he surmises, it might be because people tend to dismiss the folks in their own city. All the major art museums’ designs here went to outsiders — that’s just the way it is.

He’s not the kind of guy to fret over lost opportunity. His phone rings constantly these days, and the calls come from across the globe. He has a social responsibility, he says, to the people who use his buildings. An airport project might require him to serve 25 constituencies at once — cities, permitting agencies, airlines, contractors — but he works hardest to please passengers because they are the ultimate judges of success.